August 08, 2007

Tillman's Legacy: I haven't bothered to weigh in on the ongoing feud between certain right wing bloggers and the New Republic, since it was hard to know who to root for, but Josh Marshall hits it right on the head:

Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.

They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that's not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he's not aware of any confession or recantation.

We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.

Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn't be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it's hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.

This hardly inspires much confidence.

Like the Tillman Affair, we made need a Congressional investigation to figure out who's telling the truth. Considering that the Weekly Standard's principal source has been a former gay prostitute, a fact which they failed to disclose, I'm betting on TNR.